immersion method. She went many
months between trips to the former So-
viet Union, and found that her subjects'
language was changing. A few years ago,
she returned to Minsk.
The choice proved even lonelier than
Alexievich expected. Her mentors are
dead. Her peers have either emigrated
or faded from view. In Western Europe,
she said, she has fascinating friends who
are in their seventies, but in Belarus
people over fifty believe that life is over.
Even casual acquaintances have disap-
peared. "I noticed that when I fly some-
where I don't run into people of my
generation at the airport anymore," she
said. "No one is going anywhere."
The conventional ways of broaden-
ing her social circle do not appeal to
her. "I cannot teach, because I can't stand
to repeat myself," she said. "Also, there
are very few talented young people."
Now that her books are openly sold in
Belarus, she has readers, but "readers
can give you nothing but banalities."
Not that she doesn't like her readers---
she just does not want to talk to them.
"I'm not interested in people as such,"
she said. "A conversation with some-
one who can be a real interlocutor, an
actual exchange---but that happens so
rarely." She goes to Moscow to see pho-
tography exhibits. The visual images,
she finds, stay with her for a long time
and help with work. Music also helps:
Alexievich listens to contemporary
post-Soviet composers such as the
Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, the Es-
tonian Arvo Pärt, and the
Russian Sergei Nevsky.
She no longer has much
patience for fiction, even
some that she used to love:
"I tried rereading Platonov,
but that kind of baroque
voice doesn't do it for me
anymore. Even Tolstoy---I
went to read his 'Sevastopol
Sketches,' but I just can't
abide those masculine superstitions now."
She's more interested in nonfiction, but,
as Russia continues to isolate itself from
the world, fewer interesting books are
available in translation.
Still, she has all that is essential for
work: time and solitude. Alexievich
thinks a lot about privacy, both her own
and that of her subjects. The last story
in "Voices from Chernobyl" is narrated
by a woman who took care of her dying
husband at home:
Is this something I can talk about? Give it
words? There are secrets---I still don't under-
stand what that was. Even in our last month,
he'd still call for me at night. He felt desire. He
loved me more than he did before. During the
day, I'd look at him, and I couldn't believe
what had happened at night. We didn't want
to part. I caressed him, I petted him. . . . Do I
need to talk about it? Can I? I myself went to
him the way a man goes to a woman. What
could I give him aside from medicine? What
hope? He didn't want to die.
But I didn't tell my mother anything. She
wouldn't have understood me. She would have
judged me, cursed us. Because this wasn't just an
ordinary cancer, which everyone is already afraid
of, but Chernobyl cancer, even worse. The doc-
tors told me: if the tumors metastasized within
his body, he'd have died quickly, but instead they
crawled upward, along the body, to the face.
Something black grew on him. His chin went
somewhere, his neck disappeared, his tongue fell
out. His veins popped, he began to bleed. From
his neck, his cheeks, his ears. To all sides. I'd bring
cold water, put wet rags against him, nothing
helped. It was something awful, the whole pillow
would be covered in it. I'd bring a washbowl
from the bathroom, and the streams would hit
it, like into a milk pail. That sound, it was so
peaceful and rural. Even now I hear it at night.
When Alexievich published an ex-
cerpt from the book, she changed the
woman's name. "Two days later, she calls
me and asks, 'Why did you change my
name?' " Alexievich said. She told the
woman, " 'I didn't want to expose you to
god knows what!' She said, 'I su ered so
much and he su ered so much that I
don't want there to be any untruth.' "
Alexievich kept the speaker anony-
mous. She has overruled
other subjects who she
thought were willing to take
too great a risk. "The mob
accepts art but tears apart
people," she said. Her sub-
jects sometimes recoil at
what they've shared. The
women in "War Has Not a
Woman's Face" wanted to
rewrite the book, to replace
the pain with the very banalities Alex-
ievich had fought. "I thought, That's as
if the subjects of 'The Gulag Archipel-
ago' had tried to rewrite the book."
Solzhenitsyn's Nobel was awarded
forty-five years before hers, to the day.
Now, she said, she felt surrounded by
"the great shadows" of past Russian No-
bels. She listed Bunin, Pasternak, and
Solzhenitsyn. "I have to work," she said.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 26, 2015
41
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